The humor in many of comedian Steven Wright’s famous one-liners is that they are simultaneously familiar and absurd. At some level we all know that we are going to die, but as long as we are still alive (or a loved-one is alive) we can cling to the irrational hope, the impossible denial, that death remains a distant abstract concept, not an near inevitability.

We all need to come to terms with death in our own private way, but often those terms are not private because they drive our use (for ourselves or others) of increasingly expensive health care. Two essays over the last year by doctors explored this issue, noting that when doctors face their own mortality they often make different health care decisions for themselves than the general public.

In February of 2012, Dr. Ken Murray wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal – Why Doctors Die Differently. His primary thesis was that doctors choose less end-of-life care for themselves than the average patient. They do so largely because they are intimately familiar with the futility of much of what we do for patients who are likely going to die anyway. As one example, CPR has a success rate of about 8%, with only 3% of people receiving it going on to have a near-normal quality of life. Those numbers are pretty grim. Meanwhile, TV depictions of CPR are successful 75% of the time with 67% returning to normal life. Sometimes the person wakes up during the CPR, is fine, and then goes on to thwart a terrorist attack without missing a beat.